Australian National Broadband Network Releases 3-Year Plan 121
New submitter pcritter writes "The Australian Government has just announced the 3-year roll-out plan for its ambitious National Broadband Network. The plan details 3.5 million premises (30%) across the country to be connected to the NBN by mid-2015. A map is available showing coverage areas. The plan represents a major milestone in the NBN project, which aims to connect all of Australia with high speed broadband by 2021, with the 93% of the population on fiber to the premises (FTTP) of speeds up to 1000Mbits, and the rest on fixed wireless or satellite."
Re:Judgement (Score:2, Informative)
I thought Australian's don't directly elect their prime-minister.
Fine, we didn't elect her party. Happy?
And how can an independent back-stab... they're independent.
They back-stab by being voted in on a conservative platform by their electorate, and then jumping ship to back the Labor party.
Up to 1Gbps is actually 100Mbps only (Score:5, Informative)
The summary is wrong (isn't it always) -- essentially nobody will be getting 1Gbps on the NBN, at least not for the first decade or so. The fibres are rated at 2.5Gbps downstream, but they're split, so each house will be getting 100Mbps maximum. I certainly haven't heard of any ISPs offering more than 100Mbps, so even if the fibre can physically transmit more than that, you can't buy it as a service.
Apartment complexes can receive a dedicated fibre with more than 100Mbps capacity, but that's till split up between the apartments, the difference is that the splitter is on the premises. I think this caused a lot of confusion, because some of the logical diagrams showed a 1 Gbps fibre going to a building, and journalists didn't notice that only 100Mbps connections were going to each apartment.
One interesting issue with the NBN is that while we're going to have plenty of bandwidth, our latency to most services is still terrible. America is 200ms away, and there's not a lot in the English-speaking corner of the Internet that's closer. I hope Google, Amazon, and Microsoft start building data centres locally, or the upgrade will be largely unnoticeable for anything other than video streaming.
Re:And it's mostly areas that have decent ADSL cov (Score:5, Informative)
Seconded to previous poster, my parents live in the 'burbs in Sydney on the border of two exchanges and can't get ADSL, so no, this isn't a complete waste.
Targetting higher value areas where they are going to get a large take up and get income to support the roll out is also a good business decision.
CSIRO is building the technology to do NBN for rural. It's called Ngara:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/380377/csiro_pushes_digital_dividend_face_nbn_spectrum_buyout/ [computerworld.com.au]